United States Autos Report Q4 2014

While our view that the light vehicle market would return to 16mn units in 2014 and that the light truckmarket would outperform still very much hold true, the strength of demand has surpassed initialexpectations. Incentives and discounts during the inventory-clearing summer months, coupled withaffordable credit have resulted in total light vehicle sales for 8M14 of 11.185mn units, up 5.1% y-o-y.

Within that total, passenger car sales were up 1.2% y-o-y and light truck sales continue to dominate withgrowth of 9.0% y-o-y.

Early estimates suggest that September will be another strong month and as such we have revised ourforecast for the full year upward. The passenger car element remains the same, with a projection of 2.0%.

However, we have revised up the light truck forecast from 5.0% to 8.0%, with the slightly lower rate thancurrent sales taking into account the winding down of production of the Ford F-150 before the launch of itsnew version, which some reports suggest will now not arrive before the beginning of 2015.